


fear

by CopperCaravan



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: F/M, Fenera Mahariel, Fluff, Love Confessions, Other, Post-Canon, Sort Of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 15:45:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13367910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: After "leaving" Weisshaupt, Nathaniel and Mahariel stop to make camp. My kiddo is depressed af. Cue the sads and also the fluff.





	fear

**Author's Note:**

> I was only semi-productive today so I made myself write 500 words that turned into 500 more. Now: bed. I'm an old man, let me rest.

It’s not the first time, not for any of the things that happen tonight.

Weisshaupt’s behind them, but not far enough. All Mahariel can think about is _I’m so glad these Anders bastards don’t have Ferelden dogs._

But it’s dark and hot and they’re exhausted and she’s starting to wonder what the fucking point of it is. What’s it matter? What the fuck is even left to run toward anyway?

“Come on!” Nathaniel tries urging her forward but he’s just as worn out as she is.

“We’ve got to stop,” she says, doing just that and bending over with her palms bearing into her knees, wheezing to catch her breath. “Nathaniel, we—we’ve got to.”

They don’t have water, they don’t have food, they don’t really know where they are or which way they’re headed. They’re just running. And it’s only been a few hours of going like this but it feels like it’s been so much longer; whatever end there is seems so far away.

Sometimes she’s sure she’d have been better off if she’d just died in that fucking cave the first time Fen’Harel came sniffing about. Just gotten it over with.

“Hey.” Nathaniel’s got his hand resting heavily on her shoulder, trying to catch his breath too. “We’ll make it back home. I promise.”

Home.

It’d break his heart if she told him she didn’t know where that was anymore. Really, most of the things she can’t tell him would break his heart. That’s why she doesn’t.

“I know.”

He must know they can’t go back to the Vigil; that’d be the first place the Wardens would look. Besides, Anders is gone. Justice. Velanna. It’s broken apart now; not even good old fashioned Glavonak masonry will put it all back together properly. Gods know _her_ presence won’t be of any help. Seems razing things to the ground is her only talent these days.

“Hey,” he says again, voice louder, sterner, the way he gets when she gets like this. “We will. We _will._ ”

“I know.” She puts more effort into it this time and that seems to satisfy him. He straightens up, pulls his hand away and begins surveying the area they’ve found themselves in. Wooded, mostly. Warm, like most of the north, but growing colder by the minute now the sun’s gone down. She can hear water running somewhere nearby, so perhaps Ghilan'nain is watching over them after all. Hard to believe after all this, but she supposes it’s no more impossible than anything else.

“I’ll try to pull something together,” Nathaniel says. He removes his scarf and cloak, but even she can see that they aren’t enough to do much with aside from tie them steady into a tree. They _could_ sling his cloak over a few sticks and call it a tent, but a tent it will not be. “See if you can find that water.”

She nods, already heading to the… west, yes. Harder to get her bearings at night; she was never a good student when it came to memorizing star charts. The Hahren would be wagging his finger now. _If only you’d really known how much trouble I’d get myself into,_ she thinks, disappearing into the trees and the darkness they hold.

Finding a river—or in this case, a stream, more like—by sound isn’t nearly so easy as it seems. But when she gets close enough, she can smell it: the damp, the algae, the fucking _relief._ And when she stumbles upon the riverbed and takes one step too many right into the mud, she just laughs. And then she falls back onto her butt and lets her fingertips graze the surface of the water. Gods, she’s so tired. She could rest here, just lie back and fade into the muddy bank. One day someone else will be running away and maybe they’ll rest here too. Maybe she could be then the refuge she was intended to be too few years ago.

They’d just run from Weisshaupt—hadn’t had time or mind to grab anything useful, only what Nathaniel already had on hand and what Mahariel could grab off the guards along the way. It wasn’t much. She’s not even wearing proper clothes, just a well-worn tunic that’s come to be quite loose on her as she’s lost weight and will over the last few weeks. They didn’t even give her shoes, not that she’d much needed them inside. Would have made her jog through the fucking forest a bit easier though.

She leans forward and plops her other foot down into the water, begins washing away the blood from a few cuts and scrapes along the soles, a few along the ankle—evidence of a dense briar patch they’d rushed through. The blood and dirt swirl into the water, dissipate. It’s surreal: feeling the mass and the weight of her feet, of her ankles and calves and knees, of any part of her really. She hasn’t felt like a person in a while.

“You alright?”

She jumps a bit at the sound of Nathaniel’s voice; she hadn’t heard him come up. He sits down beside her but hunkers his knees to his chest and keeps his booted feet along the drier bit of the bank. He wraps his arms around his knees and waits.

“Yeah. Just tired, I think.”

“You look absolutely fucking awful.” He laughs, though it must be true. She hasn’t bathed in weeks, so she likely smells absolutely fucking awful as well.

But she smiles and looks over at him—hair frizzed and falling out of its ponytail, face haggard, all covered in sweat and dirt. “You’re no fucking prince yourself.” She reaches down and slaps the water at him and he leans away to avoid it. Doesn’t work.

He meets her eyes for just a second while she’s laughing, but then he looks away just as quickly, toward the water instead, and her legs, submerged and still only half-clean. He scoots a little closer to the water, pulling his own boots off and pushing up the sleeves of his shirt so he can wash up a bit too.

“Do you want to talk about it? About Weiss—”

“No,” she says. She keeps her eyes on her hands, though they’re idle now. “Not tonight. Not tomorrow.”

She picks at one of her nails, tries to rub away some dirt with the pad of her thumb.

“Here.” He takes one of her hands in his, scrubbing the calloused palm and sore knuckles with water; he barely has any more luck with the dirt, but she can’t bring herself to stop him.

She knows now. She didn’t before, not quite, not really, but now she does. She saw it in his face when he found her and she sees it there now, even so hard as he’s staring at her hand and not her face.

Nathaniel loves her.

Maybe it ought to be an easy thing, but it’s not.

“You could go home,” she says quietly.

“We _are_ going home.” He keeps his eyes down, focused. She can feel the tension build in his grip, though he’s careful of it.

“That’s not what I said.”

“I know what you said.”

The silence runs between them for a while, both gentle and forceful as the water.

He moves on to her wrist, her forearm, up to her shoulder. Slow, careful of the new bruises, the newer cuts and scrapes. Maybe it ought to be easy.

But it’s not. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asks him. “If they catch us—I’m a traitor, Nathaniel.”

His hands drop back down to hers and he just lets them lay there. He leans forward, presses his forehead into her shoulder, and is still. Then he laughs, just a bit, just quietly, but he does and he means it. “After all you’ve put me through this last year, all the times I’ve been sure you would get yourself killed— _you’re_ my greatest fear, Mahariel.”

She looks down, at their hands, at their fingers twining together, and she isn’t sure if it’s his doing or her own.

Maybe it ought to be easy.

“And you’re mine,” she whispers.

But it’s not.


End file.
